Yesterday we caught up with old friends, the Clarkes, at Austi Beach café for brekkie (breakfast) across the road from Austinmer Beach – lined with mature Norfolk pines like sentries– just down the road from Coledale. Like many of the trendy cafes that have replaced the greasy spoons of my childhood (selling deep fried fish, chips, hamburgers, and scallops – potato cakes and not the seafood), they sell the typical fresh produce that Sydney cafes now celebrate. Geoff had sourdough toast with mashed peas and poached eggs. I had banana bread and a detox juice. It was another sunny day and we sat outside.

Rob and Kylie were at Macquarie Uni with me and then Rob, within a stone’s throw of graduation, landed up heading Leo Burnett, Australia (advertising) as CEO. His star has continued to ascend and he is now COO of Aussie Rugby. Kylie, a solicitor like me, has always been a part of the Mosman, North Shore (upper class, if Aussies have one) landscape. She grew up on the middle harbour foreshore and now Rob and she have a house right on Chinaman’s Beach, just before the Spit Bridge. History repeating itself in a good way.

We hooked up in London when I first arrived in the late 80s and even after they downed tools and kackadoodled back to Sydney, we kept the fire of friendship burning, staying with them on our trips Down Under. Sometimes we visited her parents ‘weekender’ in Palm Beach, but think ‘Kennedy’ type complex, rather than the fibro Potts holiday habitat. All sandstone with a large courtyard in the middle and bang smack on the crest of the beach. The soap Home and Away is filmed around there. Palm Beach is where the good and the great of Sydney play. It’s where Tom Cruise Nicole Kidman holidayed when she wasn’t a resident.

Kylie was full of news and somehow we got onto the subject of Aussie musicians, whose fame, sadly, had rarely left the Aussie shores. She was a huge fan of Richard Clapton’s, aka black t-shirt man with black hair’s, music. Richard’s famous songs: Girls on the Avenue, Best Years of our Lives, Down to the Lucky Country etc.

Being a bit of a celebrity stalker myself, I could savor the story she laid out for us.

She had been at a ‘ladies who lunch’ charity lunch at the Governor General’s House at Kirribilli (residence of the Queen’s rep in Oz) and was tottering along in her glad rags to the bus stop in Neutral Bay, when she almost bumped into the man himself, Richard Clapton. The muso was laden with multiple plastic carriers of supermarket food – for home – not a gig. Not the sort of thing you expect a rock star to be doing on a typical weekday arvo (afternoon). It just so happened that she and Rob had recently crowd funded a part of his upcoming new album, to be recorded in Nashville. In return, Rich had agreed to come and play a short gig at their home on the foreshore.

So with a couple of glasses of champagne under her belt, Kylie approached him and explained that through her crowd funding, she had a stake in his new album. And that he would be gracing her home with his rock star talent. I of course suggested that it would be mega if he performed on the harbour itself of a floatie – boat, pontoon – of some sort.

So if you happen to be sailing off Chinaman’s Beach and notice a chubby, black haired and black attired man on a pontoon, belting out music, you will know it is indeed Kylie’s new bestie, Richard Clapton.

Today the weather has turned. It is stormy and I can see big swell approaching the coastline. I can see it from where I am typing this – majestic.